Howdy Mates! 

The meeting notes are from the themes review team discussion.

• Date: October 10, 2023
• Time: 15:00 UTC
• Location: #themereview channel
• Agenda: Themes team meeting agenda
• Agenda Prepared by: @kafleg
• Meeting facilitator – @kafleg
• Notes taker – @kafleg
• Full transcript –  #themereview channel

Attendees:

• @digamberpradhan
• @greenshady 
• @poena
• @shivashankerbhatta
• @Rinku Y
• @aslamnaik
• @huzaifaalmesbah
• @FahimMurshed

Weekly updates

In the past 7 days,

• 625 tickets were opened
• 637 tickets were closed
  • 626 tickets were made live.
    • 32 new Themes were made live.
    • 594 Theme updates were made live.
    • 3 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 11 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Note: These stats include both the new theme tickets and updated theme tickets as well.

For now, 12 BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. themes are currently being reviewed. In the last 7 days, 9 block themes are live.

Note: These stats include both the new theme tickets and updated theme tickets as well.

The themes team published weekly updates about tickets and HelpScout emails. Here is the theme statistic for the past 7 days. The most current stats can be found here.

Thank you @acosmin, @fahimmurshed, @vowelweb for reviewing themes this week.

Handle the themes settings page requirement

During the meeting, we talked about various things about this. You can read the entire conversation here. During the meeting, @shivashankerbhatta said, “We could greatly simplify the process of using WordPress by assisting users in selecting and configuring themes for their websites. ”

@greenshady is interested in helping theme reviewers to review the JS part of the theme setting/onboarding page if necessary. Also, he is interested in running mentorship for theme reviewers.

@kafleg was worried on, “All of us saying that theme settings page will add value to the theme users. How we can track that? It is really adding user experience of just adding extra workload for reviewing themes?”

@poena added, “I will repeat that it is not up to a theme developer or pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party developer to solve the onboarding issues. CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. issues should be fixed in core.”

Before deciding to allow or disallow the theme setting page, @greenshady will write a blog post to get feedback from everyone and the themes team will decide after checking the input.

Evaluate requirements of themes

@poena said, “It has been two years. I think the team should evaluate them regularly.” So, during the meeting we all agreed that, we need to evaluate the theme requirements.

Once we get into the #2 agenda final, at that time, we need to work on this #3 as well. Some requirements are really outdated or some need to be added.

 Create a skills inventory for reviewers

During the meeting, there were questions:

• How to create a skill inventory of reviewers’ skills and find and address areas of improvement?
• How to do it in a way that reviewers are comfortable with it and don’t feel bad if they are not experts on everything?

@greenshady is interested to work alongside folks and help build any training system we might need. He would like to see a Make Themes post to discuss what such a system might look like.

@kafleg added, “We can also divide the work based on the reviewer expertise. Like we are doing for code review and accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) review.”. Also, he added, And we can also run mentorship sessions for reviewers?

We’ll discuss about this idea in next meeting as well.

Open Floor

A few events happening over the next month that will be related to theming:

• Hallway Hangout on block themes on October 12.
• Hallway Hangout on WP 6.4 features October 12. Sign up here.
• Developer Hours on November 2 will cover the Twenty Twenty-Four theme

#meeting-notes, #themes-team